It’s February. The month of sweet tarts and sweet hearts (and far too much candy being tossed around, if you ask me).
Fittingly, it also happens to American Heart Month, a time to call attention to cardiovascular diseases (CVD), including stroke, which are our nation’s No. 1 killer (!) A full 50% of people with diabetes die of cardiovascular disease, according to the World Health Organization.
The first thing you should know is that this…
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I’m off to Dallas today to take part in a special patient advisory council* for the American Heart Association, which is desperately trying to reach out to people with diabetes about heart health.
They’ve created a program called Heart of Diabetes (sponsored by Takeda Pharmaceuticals) and are busy gathering patient stories in video format. Now they’re trying to figure out how to further get the word out, to people with Type 2 diabetes in particular,…
OK Gentlemen, you are excused for today. No hard feelings.
Now, for those of you Ladies with any interest in conceiving babies any time soon, here’s another good reason to choose breastfeeding:
New research shows that lactation lowers your risk of metabolic syndrome and heart disease, AND the longer you breastfeed, lower the incidence of cardiovascular risk — even years after delivery. This is true whether or not the mother had gestational diabetes.
Researchers got…
Diabetes and heart risk. My goodness do we hear a lot about that. And for good reason: people with diabetes are 2-4 times more likely to develop atherosclerosis (hardening of the blood vessels) and five times more likely to have a stroke than people without diabetes, according to the ADA. Yipes! And then there’s the uproar of late about diabetes drugs that possibly increase the risk of heart attack (although the evidence on Avandia apparently…
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Per my recent post on the troubles at the FDA, we’ve launched an online letter and petition titled, “Ask the FDA to Better Serve Diabetes Patients’ Needs,” that we’re asking everyone to sign. The website is fittingly called Heal-the-FDA. Please go and have a look.
You will see that we have a growing list of supporters, including politically-minded D-blogger Scott Strumello, who flagged this issue last summer; Dr. Steven Edelman, founder of TCOYD; pumping expert…